


Election Days

by Raven (singlecrow)



Category: Star Trek, West Wing
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, F/F, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-09
Updated: 2011-02-09
Packaged: 2017-10-15 12:57:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/161021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/singlecrow/pseuds/Raven
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One thousand five hundred member worlds, ten trillion citizens. CJ and Donna are getting through a lot of takeaway pizza.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Election Days

_0/10,003,004,555,850_

It's a ceremony for the media. It's always a ceremony for the media. CJ's actually gone outside for the occasion, though, which is something new after what feels like weeks and weeks living inside her office and sleeping under her desk. They're standing backstage, waiting for the fireworks to start. Above, there is the panoply of stellar light, asterisms of geostationary spacedocks with the familiar stars as backdrop.

Donna squeezes CJ's hand: _doing okay?_

CJ smiles and squeezes back.

The President of the United Federation of Planets steps onto the stage, the eyes of the galaxy's media on him – imaging tech, sound recorders, telepathic engrams, holovisuals and olfactory resonance scanners, all documented and rubber-stamped with unique electronic fingerprint identifiers, because CJ is good at what she does – and places his hands on the large, softly-glowing red button. It registers his DNA, records his identity. He chooses.

Above them, the great glowing counter – one of them, anyway; CJ worked for months, making them legible and sensible to all the Federation's major life-forms and most of the minor ones, of all abilities and sensory apparatus – flips from 0 to 1.

It's nothing much. But in the waning light it looks impressive, and CJ feels Donna let out a sigh of relief, beside her. She doesn't have one of her own. They're just beginning.

*

 _250,888,946/10,003,004,555,850_

"Equivalent of the North American continent," Donna says, stepping into CJ's office. "Actually it's two worlds, with low densities – Engramma V, population of about a hundred million, and Meenak, a Vulcan colony world out by the Neutral Zone."

"What's next?" says CJ, distractedly. It's been an hour and the rain's blowing in from the river. She looks blearily out the window at the Île de la Cité and wishes for a moment she were somewhere very far away from this wet night and that gleaming counter, the final digit spinning round too fast to be anything but blur.

Donna grins. "I brought you pizza."

CJ thinks about kissing her, then doesn't. Then she changes her mind, and they sit on the floor and eat it out of the box and when Toby comes to bug them they don't let him have any.

*

 _7,666,306,997/10,003,004,555,850_

"I have an errand to run," Donna says, "and you need some fresh air before you, I don't know, start nesting in here."

Donna knows what she's doing. The nearest sub-orbital pad is in Toronto; they fly in, beam into a subsidiary transport receiving station on the edge of the Lake of the Woods, and take a small flying hopper from there. Donna steers the thing expertly through the greyish sky and manages to look simultaneously competent and nonchalant. The horizon pitches and yaws and CJ swallows deeply, thinks about replicating seasickness pills, and says, carefully, "You know, you didn't have to go home. You could have voted in your office. You could have pressed a button and someone would have brought you a voting card on a silver salver."

"That's a lie, isn't it," says Donna, eyes ahead of her. They scrape a tree, and CJ presses her lips together very firmly.

"Not the part about voting from your office," CJ says, and sits down in a hurry as Donna lands the hopper neatly between the trees.

The polling station is as tiny, relatively speaking, as the town, and as they walk towards it, CJ feels like she's getting some of her colour back in the brisk wind off the water. Donna is hesitant, for the first time since she marched CJ out of her office over shrill protestations about _privilege of rank_ and _this is mutiny, you know_ and _Donna for god's sake let go of me_.

"There aren't many offworlders here," Donna says, apologetically. "My mother and I were the only ones in town, when I was growing up. We don't have secret-ballot screening for telepathic species, and we have to have an amanuensis sent from Minneapolis for people who don't use visual or auditory communication, and sometimes there's quite a long line..."

"Luckily," CJ says, firmly, "I am entirely psi-null, and while you are doing your democratic duty I think I shall acquire a fruit basket to give to your mom."

Donna grins, and goes to cast her vote.

*

 _510,884,666,777/10,003,004,555,850_

"Lawsuits!" Toby says, with great deliberation, and slams a padd on her desk.

"Good morning, Toby," CJ says, guardedly.

"The press are going to want to know about these," he insists. For a man who doesn't show emotion, CJ thinks to herself, he certainly has a way of increasing the tension in the room. "Someone on some godforsaken little moon out towards the Beta Quadrant is applying for certiorari because Bartlett once took an undocumented transporter and thus is _legally a clone_."

"That's nonsense," CJ says, calmly, kicks the latest batch of pizza boxes under her desk and waits for him to sit on it. He does.

"And," he continues, frustration evident in every lack of line on his expressionless face, "someone else, here on Earth" – this, apparently, Toby takes as a personal insult – "is claiming electoral malpractice. Because the debates weren't broadcast in Klingon."

CJ blinks. "Klingon isn't a Federation language."

"No," Toby says.

"Are any of the candidates on any member world Klingon?"

"No," Toby says.

"Did the Klingon Empire have a collective personality transplant and accede to the Federation overnight and someone left it out of the morning briefing?"

"No," Toby says. "The plaintiff claims that as there are some Federation citizens who are Klingons..."

"There are, like, three."

"Thirty-eight," Toby says, now consulting his padd. "Mostly survivors from the Battle of Khitomer, and their children. Oh, and there is one half-Klingon girl on Nessik with a human father, but she's not of age."

"Have any of them requested the debates be in Klingon?"

"No," Toby says.

"Is it any one of them who's raising the claim?"

"No," Toby says.

CJ sits on the edge of the table next to him and throws off her shoes. "I'm not really seeing the issue here, Toby," she tells him, calmly. "There's a decent Vulcan restaurant in Montmartre. You want takeout?"

"I want pizza," he says, and CJ laughs.

*

 _5,978,888,030,005/10,003,004,555,850_

Josh marches in and says, in a voice laced with doom, "Riots."

It's an immediate crisis meeting, held in his office. In seconds the desk is covered with padds and papers, and a holographic feed is anchored off the back wall. CJ watches moving pictures of people marching with flaming torches and feels sick.

"Achenar," Toby says, thoughtfully. "It would be."

Achenar is the newest member world of the Federation, CJ remembers. The election was delayed by several weeks so its petition would be complete in time. On the screen, people with beautiful silicate glass bodies, iridescent like oil in sunlight, smash each other into jagged smithereens. There are slogans being shouted, garbled, angry, losing verbs as the translator tries and fails to capture the fury boiling beneath.

"Technical malfunctions," Josh says. "There were issues on the southern continent cities, something about votes failing to register even when the procedure was followed. Then some dissident group hit the airwaves and started talking about it was all a Federation plot to make fools of them, they'd been duped into surrendering their sovereignty in exchange for being dominated from elsewhere, you know the spiel, and the people who had just spent months and years working through their accession petition weren't too happy, and then" – he waved a hand at the projection – "this."

CJ turns away from the screen and then Josh is saying something like, "Starfleet... forces... _USS Excelsior_... one day away at warp nine..."

She says, "No."

Josh looks at her, and then there's a sudden silence, the volume on the transmission muted. Toby's staring at her, eyes dark and dispassionate, and there's a minor rustle at the door; Bartlett's there, too, with that way she has of dimming her own presence when need be. From the other side of the room, Donna's thought appears in CJ's mind: _you tell them_.

"No," CJ says again, stronger. "No forces."

"CJ," Josh begins, "the violence…"

"Send someone from Starfleet," she says authoritatively. "And send someone from this office. Full dress uniform, _no phasers_. Tell them on planetwide broadcast that no one's making fools of them. Tell them that if they want, we will do this again, every world, every moon, every space station, every ship. The whole thing. They matter."

Toby says, "Yes, ma'am."

Bartlett smiles and disappears.

*

 _9,885,999,385,993/10,003,004,555,850_

Donna comes into CJ's office in the afternoon, and says, "We have a problem."

Her mental shielding is up. CJ takes a deep breath and says, "What?"

"The planet Chandra V. Do you know it?"

CJ does a mental cross-reference. "Er, Chandrans – there's about a million of them, give or take, they don't travel from their homeworld very much, they're minor telepaths, they live four or five hundred years each so their population is pretty much static."

Donna nods. "They're unusual among most Federation species in that they don't have a concept of childhood or adolescence. Their offspring are born with entire mental capacity."

CJ nods, and then says, "Oh, shit."

"Yeah." Donna sits down on her desk, and CJ thinks inconsequentially that if she's ever president, she'll make people treat her furniture with respect. "I've got the lawyers working on it. There doesn't seem to be any provision in the Federation statutes for people who are born and attain majority once an election has begun."

CJ joins her in sitting on the edge of the desk, throws off her shoes again, and laughs, a little hysterically, a little like she's coming unglued on the inside. "How far, at warp nine?"

"Two days," Donna tells her.

"Send a voting slip with my compliments. Don't do it over subspace. Oh, and certify it for review to the local jurisdiction before anyone else does, if a precedent's being set I want it to be a good one."

Donna nods, and pauses at the door. "How are you doing, CJ?"

CJ leans back in her chair. "How do you feel about Risa, when all this is over?"

Donna nods. "Would there be drinks with umbrellas in?"

"As many as you like. Big enough to do lengths in."

"That'd be okay," Donna says, and as she's going out someone else comes in. It's Bartlett, and CJ inhales sharply and wonders frantically about the last time she put on a clean shirt.

"Er," she says, "good afternoon, ma'am."

"Good afternoon, CJ." Bartlett's young; younger than CJ herself, but with a serenity that comes with greater age. The news media have speculated that it's the Vulcan blood in her, a couple of generations back, but CJ thinks privately that it's just something about her, or if not only herself, something about all of where she comes from. One of her ancestors signed the American Declaration of Independence when Earth had sub-planetary sovereigns, and one of her more recent ancestors was a president, and she has their history and a grace all her own.

"Put it on my account," Bartlett says. "The trip to Risa."

She's gone, and CJ is grinning to herself.

*

 _9,999,999,385,993/10,003,004,555,851_

Toby's been ticking off lists and throwing around paper. Vulcan colonies, Betazed, Andoria, Sigma Eridani. On the third moon of Vulgaris, the Grizzelda are coming out of their six-month hibernation cycle just in time. The counter is spinning a crescendo towards the end.

Donna says, half-hanging out of CJ's office window on another wet Parisian night, "How often do you think of yourself this way?"

"What way?" CJ asks, reading the reports from Achenar, from Earth, from Tellar, from Sigma Eridani, all at once and none at once as she lets them drop. She has a headache starting, and the beginnings of the deepest tiredness she's ever felt.

"Like..." Donna pauses. "Like, you're from California, CJ. And from Earth, and from the Sol system, at a push. And me, I'm from Minnesota, and from Earth, and from Betazed, and my mother is from the southern provinces there and so I am, too. But today, now..." – she waves a hand, turning away from her contemplation of the Seine and the reflected lights of the city – "I feel like I'm... part of something. Something, something bigger."

CJ finds herself smiling through the pain beginning in her temples. "Like... say, a _Federation_?"

Donna makes a mock-swipe at her head. "You know what I mean, CJ! I never think of myself as a Federation citizen. I mean, I'm not like humans – though I _like_ humans" – this with an impish grin at CJ – "and I'm not like felinoids from Sigma Eridani or rock-based Horta and I'm not much like Bolians, or like Sulamids with enough tentacles to play symphonies by themselves. But somehow, I am like those people. I... _am_ those people."

" _The spear in the other's heart is the spear in your own: you are he._ " In the silence that follows, Toby steps in. "Data from Sigma, CJ."

CJ catches his gaze, feeling for a rare moment nothing but softness. "Toby, was that Surak?"

Toby merely looks at her. "Take a look at the numbers by the morning, would you, please?"

CJ nods, and rests a hand on his shoulder before he goes. Behind her, Donna looks up at the night sky and thinks, with quiet delight: _look what we did._

*

 _10,003,004,555,851/10,003,004,555,851_

A magnificent hush is falling across the stage, the audience, the fifteen hundred worlds.

CJ takes another deep breath. Her people are gathered beside her, consulting their padds and communicators, dealing with messages coming in from subspace, in from the rest of the planet, in from the next room. They're working, they're happy, they have the fizz from the champagne still in their blood. They're ready.

Donna brushes past her, and there's a thought of love in CJ's mind, as wordless and perfectly-formed as a pearl. She turns to look at CJ as she goes, eyes dark and full of joy.

CJ walks out on the stage, in front of the ten trillion people, and says, "Ladies, gentlemen, androgynous and asexual beings, the President of the United Federation of Planets!"

Bartlett steps out. Around her is the roar of people like the sound of the ocean; above her the sky full of stars.


End file.
